"No Dogs Or Actors Allowed"

It may be difficult for some to understand today, but there was a time in the United States when some people looked upon entertainers as being one step lower than prostitutes.

In 1963, when I was 13 years old, I was with my maternal grandmother buying groceries at a local store and a woman came up to me, wanting to complement me on a guest appearance I had made on a local TV show a week before. My grandmother angrily said to her, “There’s some lower class boy who unfortunately looks like my grandson appearing on television. No one in our family would lower themselves to be in show business”.  What could I, a 13 year old kid, do then but say nothing? Contradict my own grandmother in public?

Ironically, the money we were using to buy the groceries was from my paycheck for being in “Oliver!” on Broadway at that time (under yet another stage name).

My salary from the 7 Broadway shows I was in between 1960 and 1969, the nightclub and supper club gigs and the local TV work I did in Philadelphia during that same time period paid the mortgage, put food on the table and enabled my older brother and my father to go to college (and my father to seminary). But due to my grandmother's rigid thinking and her constant "What will people think?" attitude, I had to pretend when I was home or at school or hanging out in the neighborhood that I wasn't an entertainer and whenever I was in a stage show or on TV or singing in a nightclub or supper club, I had to use a different stage name so people wouldn't make the connection and "bring shame on my family".